ABSTRACT
Governments around the Earth have claimed authority over such entities as air, water, landscapes, wildlife, and the ocean and its shores for the public benefit under various permutations of what is now typically termed the "public trust doctrine" (PTD) since at least the Roman Institutes of Justinian. Mouffe argued that, "instead of trying to erase the traces of power and exclusion, democratic politics requires us to bring them to the fore, to make them visible so that they can enter the terrain of contestation". However the dominance of a single community limits the model's value as a means of building alliances between conservation communities that enable collaboration when their values coincide, as in the case of wildlife conservation. The chapter adds that current sanctification of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation (NAMWC) unnecessarily limits the open thinking that may enable the emergence of new ideas about wildlife conservation through practices of agonistic democracy.
